HOW DO WE CHANGE OUR CULTURE OF SEX ABUSE?
Ending misogyny and objectification starts with ending denial, writes Calvin White.
So, now we are daily attending to the latest chapters in the Weinstein book on sexual predation. The #MeToo phenomenon has carried the sordid truth to likely unprecedented duration. And before all of this, among many too many other perpetrators relegated to history, were Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby and then Donald Trump. There are two important factors that are being missed in the media focus on each new revelatory incident and on the reactive voices.
First is the reality that nothing changes. The clamour and articulation, regardless of how heartfelt, fades away, and life continues on. Stephanie Nolen for the Globe & Mail back in 2012 examined the lived situation in India in the aftermath of the vicious gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi. The horrific crime caught both India and the world’s attention. There were widespread protests, marches, declarations, and rueful analyses in India, but Nolen’s research showed that the overwhelming consensus was that nothing would change. And it hasn’t. New, similarly horrific, events are common.
This leads to the second factor. As long as we focus on events, personalities, cultures, and countries and, counterintuitively, as long as we focus on men and their behaviour, we will be fooling ourselves and betraying all the victims to come. The #MeToo bandwagon is honest, it’s empowering, it’s needed and it’s misleading. The reason it’s misleading is because the appropriate response to any female revealing her abuse, harassment, attack, exploitation, or mistreatment is “Of Course You Were”. The real issue is not about Weinstein or Trump, it’s about us. All of us — all the mothers and fathers have played a role in raising our young and creating where we are and have always been. For every Weinstein, there are a million other males. An honest examination of many a husband’s dating behaviour with their wives might be a bit sobering.
That’s why it is unfortunate that some weeks back fashion leader Donna Karan was so roundly denounced for suggesting that women’s choices played a role in Weinstein’s situation. Her comments were spun as blaming the victims. She could have been dumped on for that aspect but then listened to for the actual insight.
Honour killings, female genital mutilation, unequal pay for women, enforced wearing of niqabs, women expected to walk behind their husbands, plural wives, date rapes, preponderance of men in boardrooms, obeying one’s husband, and so-called “sex appeal” fashion are all coming from the same place. We are a species in which men have called the shots. And despite all the words and sweat hurled against that, we still validate it on a constant daily basis. All societies are complicit in the training of our boys to become predatory men, in the objectification of women, and in the contradictory messages to our girls.
The pornography industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise based on male dominance and satisfaction. The contact sports industry transparently and directly trumpets the need to do whatever it takes to win. Being mean and dirty, devious and dominating gets you in the Hall of Fame. Like sports in general, the capitalist structure of economics is based on success and only success. Cut your competitor’s throat if need be, do a Volkswagen and lie about your emissions level if it makes more money. And listen to the rap/hip hop music industry and their unending missives about bitches, hos, and booty — how can any consumer not be buying into that definitive misogyny? Even the silly but popular idea of a man cave plays into the role of men’s right to be gross in private. We are societies throughout the world permeated with this overriding ethos of do whatever it takes to get what you want.
This is the world our boys grow up in. How can they not turn out with predator proclivity? They do daily times table drills to be sure they progress in mathematics, but no school anywhere gives remotely close to the same emphasis on becoming a rounded, aware, respectful human. Instead, we reward outer achievement. We consider girls sluts for engaging in sex but we refer to boys as getting lucky. It’s not at all stressed over if a boy is in a position to have sex with a girl but the opposite evokes parental terror.
The “virginity” demand of some cultures tends to be a virginity hope for everyone else.
Boys grow up with the expectation, often directly stated, that they need to win over the girl. They need to pursue her to show her they really want her. They need to not give up. They are never, ever taught to listen to the girl. And girls are most often equally taught to take into account, if not be fully swayed by, how hard the boy pursues her. We equate the boy’s persistence with his awareness of our worth.
This all actively shows itself in the early teens, when boys are going after sex. How many young girls can trace their first sexual activity to the boy’s insistence, badgering, pleading, threatening, promising? How many girls can say that the desire to be wanted, to fit in, to keep the boy, to not make a scene or make him angry didn’t play a big role in their behaviour?
Every instance in which females are depicted so that their style, their beauty, their bodies are the attraction that objectification, that superficializing and depersonalizing, translates right into the dumbing down of males. It supports the training to go after the prize. Do what it takes. Getting what you want means selfesteem and success.
The way out of any dysfunction, any quagmire, is to break denial, to open to the full picture, and to chart a course.
We could start doing that in schools by prioritizing the growing of boys and girls into full humans at every grade level. If that was programmed into the entire school experience and done as seriously and persistently as math and science it would at least create some resistance to all the above-mentioned norms that lead to predation.
Calvin White holds a M.Ed. in counselling psychology, is author of The Secret Life of Teenagers and Letters from the Land of Fear, and served 30 years as a high school counsellor.
All societies are complicit in the training of our boys to become predatory men, in the objectification of women, and in the contradictory messages to our girls. Calvin White For every Weinstein, there are a million other males.